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Kenya is one of the countries whose teachers the UNESCO (2015) report cited as lacking curriculum support in the classroom. As is the case in many African countries, a large portion of teachers in Kenya enter the teaching profession when inadequately prepared, while those already in the field receive insufficient support in their professional lives. The cascade model has often been utilized in the country whenever need for teachers’ continuing professional development (TCPD) has arisen,...

In the revised Fourth Edition of the best-selling text, John W. Creswell and new co-author Cheryl N. Poth explore the philosophical underpinnings, history, and key elements of five qualitative inquiry approaches: narrative research, phenomenology, grounded theory, ethnography, and case study. Preserving Creswell's signature writing style, the authors compare the approaches and relate research designs to each of the traditions of inquiry in a highly accessible manner. Featuring new content,...

A literature review is a central part of any research project, allowing the existing research to be mapped and new research questions to be posited. However, due to the limitations of human data processing, the literature review can suffer from an inability to handle large volumes of research articles. The computational literature review (CLR) is proposed here as a complementary part of a wider literature review process. The CLR automates some of the analysis of research articles with...

Over the past decade, the number of one-to-one laptop programs in schools has steadily increased. Despite the growth of such programs, there is little consensus about whether they contribute to improved educational outcomes. This article reviews 65 journal articles and 31 doctoral dissertations published from January 2001 to May 2015 to examine the effect of one-to-one laptop programs on teaching and learning in K–12 schools. A meta-analysis of 10 studies examines the impact of laptop...

The promise of randomized controlled trials is that evidence gathered through the evaluation of a specific program helps us—possibly after several rounds of fine-tuning and multiple replications in different contexts—to inform policy. However, critics have pointed out that a potential constraint in this agenda is that results from small “proof-of-concept” studies run by nongovernment organizations may not apply to policies that can be implemented by governments on a large scale. After...

This review provides a summary of existing research on: What are the different employment outcomes and cost effectiveness differences between public vs. private basic education (primary and lower secondary) in low and middle income countries and what accounts for any difference (disaggregated by gender as appropriate)? Do either private or public education systems focus more greatly on providing students with foundation skills (literacy and numeracy skills) and does this have an impact on...

Telemedicine is an increasingly common approach to improve healthcare access in developing countries with fledgling healthcare systems. Despite the strong financial, logistical and clinical support from non-governmental organisations (NGOs), government ministries and private actors alike, the majority of telemedicine projects do not survive beyond the initial pilot phase and achieve their full potential. Based on a review of 35 entrepreneurial telemedicine and mHealth ventures, and 17...

Attempts to address global pressure to achieve Education for All have been hampered by two fundamental challenges in developing countries, namely an acute shortage of teachers and large rural populations in these countries. In addition there is a trend for qualified competent teachers to shun working in rural settings. While recruitment of professionally unqualified graduate teachers into the teaching profession has become internationally acclaimed to address in particular rural school...

Pratham’s “Read India” initiative is a large-scale intervention to improve basic learning and arithmetic among children in primary school. It was started almost 10 years ago and has evolved considerably over time. Currently, this initiative uses two strategies. The first strategy is to work directly with village communities and local schools to improve children’s learning. “Learning camps” are organized in the local school or community for a period of 6–10 days at a time. Local village...

In recent years, many educators have turned to professional learning networks (PLNs) to grow in their craft with peers who are more accessible online because of reduced temporal and spatial constraints. While educators have cultivated PLNs, there is a dearth of research about the effects of PLNs. This manuscript reports the findings of a qualitative study that investigated PLN experiences through the analysis of survey data from 732 P-12 teachers. Data analysis suggests that the anytime,...

This light-touch review of literature on classroom assessments (CA) in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and South Asia finds that they are rarely implemented effectively. It is extremely common to find references to CA in policy documents but find that teachers do not use CA in the classroom. Sometimes this is because there is little institutional support for CA, few example materials, and no training, and sometimes this is because teachers do not understand or see the purpose of CA and continue to...

Violence against children is a global problem. It includes physical violence, psychological violence such as insults and humiliation, discrimination, neglect and maltreatment. It has short- and long-term repercussions that are often grave and damaging for children (Pinheiro 2006). Bullying, gender-based violence, accidental violence, discrimination and violence, sexual assault or harassment, physical violence and psychological violence, describe some of the most prevalent forms of...

Despite the online availability of data, analysis of this information in academic research is arduous. This article explores the application of supervised machine learning (SML) to overcome challenges associated with online data analysis. In SML classifiers are used to categorize and code binary data. Based on a case study of Dutch employees’ work-related tweets, this paper compares the coding performance of three classifiers, Linear Support Vector Machine, Naïve Bayes, and logistic...

This study on Assessment of mathematics education in Sub Saharan African countries is in support of the efforts to improve mathematics education in the countries of Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). The study is in response to a growing recognition that countries in SSA will need to boost performance in the Science Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) subjects if they are to realize their full potential in a competitive global market increasingly shaped by the use of new technologies....

Previous randomized studies have shown that addressing children’s current learning gaps, rather than following an over-ambitious uniform curriculum, can lead to significant learning gains. In this study, we evaluate a series of efforts to scale up the NGO Pratham’s approach to teaching children according to their actual learning level, in four Indian States. While this approach was previously shown to be extremely effective when implemented with community volunteers outside of school, the...